Untitled, from the portfolio "Four X Four X Four"

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Artist/Maker Mel Bochner (American, born 1940)

Publisher Parasol Press, New York

Printer Watanabe Studios, Brooklyn, NY

Date1990

MediumScreenprint

DimensionsSheet: 48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9 cm) Frame: 48 7/8 × 48 7/8 × 2 1/16 in. (124.1 × 124.1 × 5.2 cm)

Credit LineGift of Martina Hamilton, P1995

Object number2003.12.1.4

Not on view

DescriptionAfter earning a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1962, Mel Bochner moved to New York, where, at the School of Visual Arts in 1966, he held what some critics consider to be the first conceptual art exhibition in the United States: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. In his sculptures, paintings, and prints, Bochner has explored and interrogated the nature of systems of representation, including language, numbers, measurements, and art itself. His work often deals in contradiction, creating environments in which the transparency of concepts such as physical space and language are questioned and their complexity revealed. A tension between illusion and reality is often readily apparent as the artist probes the movements of the hand versus the perception of the eye. Bochner has often used printmaking as a forum for working through ideas pertinent to, and problems presented by, other mediums. In 1973–74, he created a series of aquatints at Parasol Press; in 1988, he returned to execute more and then, in 1990, to make this untitled screenprint for the portfolio “Four x Four x Four,” in which four artists—Bochner, Robert Mangold, Barry Le Va, and Sol LeWitt—each created a large, square print, four feet by four feet in size, in an edition of one hundred. A series of lithographs Bochner produced in the same year at Diane Villani Editions are reminiscent of this work in that they also depict perspectival cubes within an overall ambiguous space partially defined by areas of the white substrate. Martina Hamilton, P1995, was a gallery owner and print dealer in New York City for many years. Between 1993 and 2003, she donated more than twenty works to the Emerson Gallery, including the complete “Four x Four x Four” portfolio. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017) From the "Four x Four x Four" Portfolio published by Parasol Press. 3 Large blue cubes comprised of smaller cubes

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Additional Details

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 113, illus.).

Provenance 2003: Hamilton College (Fred L. Emerson Gallery), by gift of Martina Hamilton;
? - 2003: Martina Hamilton, by purchase.

Published References Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 248.

Signature Signed and dated "BOCHNER 1968.1990" at lower left in pencil.

Inscribed "20/100" at lower left in pencil.